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I'm running spamassassin + clamav on my server to filter spam and virus emails. This is pretty effective and keeps my inbox nearly 100% clean. But this also has some downsides. Over the last few days I received hundreds of email bounces. Everyone of these messages is passed through the scanners. The result was a 14 hour email queue and a load of nearly 2 on my 2500+ AMD Athlon box. Since that box is also used as a webserver I had a problem. The solution was to disable clamav.

Without clamav parsing every message, the quese was gone within minutes and the load dropped to a normal value. I have no idea why clamav needs that much processor time, but if you have load problems on you system with a similar setup, consider disabling the anti virus scanner.

[Update Oct. 21, 2007]You can avoid this by using clamav-daemon instead a direct call to clamav. Syscp's default is a direct call to clamav. Not very clever if you ask me.